If you already have Internet Explorer 7 installed you might be interested in Multiple-IE . An installer for the standalone versions of IE6, IE5.5, IE5, IE4 & IE3!

First I would like to apologize to those who tried the previously published steps and missed up their IE6. Running IE7s.exe should fix everything for you.

Internet Explorer 7 is here! Microsoft officially released IE7 to the public after almost a year and a half of public beta testing.

The way in which we can run the release version of IE7 in standalone mode (side by side with IE6) hasn't changed much. Perhaps the only change is that without the launch program (in other words without the registry entries) IE7 auto-registers all the dlls that came with it rendering IE6 useless.

As usual there are two ways; the automatic one with the installer or the manual one.

**Skip this part if you're after the installer...**

The following steps should get IE7 up and running

• Extract the IE7 self-extracting archive with WinRar or using the /x switch

IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe /x


• Navigate to the update directory of the extracted archive and run xmllitesetup.exe (This will enable limited support of tabbed browsing)
• Download IE7s.exe from the link below.
• Run IE7s.exe with your fingers crossed.

To enable conditional CSS support <!--[if lte IE 7]> you need to edit the windows registry:

• Click Start -> Run...
• type "regedit" to start the registry editor.
• Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version Vector
• rename the key "IE" to "xIE".

**Using the installer**

• Download and run the installer from the link below.
• It will automatically download the English x86 version of IE7 from Microsoft's servers.
• Start IE7s.exe with your fingers crossed.

Obviously some features will be broken like :

• Context menus (the one you see when you right click on an empty space).
• The main menu bar.
• Disabling popup blocker.
• Feed reader.
• Installing ActiveX components and ActiveX support.
• Showing combo-boxes
• Web pages that require authentication.
• Adding search providers via websites (like this one for example)

The only way to fix this is to install IE7 using the official installer. The reason is that they require replacing certain keys used by IE6 in the windows registry.

Search Providers

Search providers can only be added directly via the registry. It is relatively easy to write your own search provider and add it. Here are examples which you can download and run

• Google
• MSN
• Yahoo
• Dogpile
• Windows Live

And here is a script that will remove ALL the search providers. Search providers remover.

Download Links

Here is a direct link to IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe
For versions other than x86 english go to Internet Explorer 7 download page.

Download Internet Explorer 7 standalone Installer (427KB)

Download Internet Explorer 7 standalone program only (149KB)

And for those paranoid here is the source code. (907KB) VS2005

In case you get into problems like IE6 not starting properly after running IE7 in standalone mode download and run this registry cleanup script.

If you absolutely must and there is no other solution you can reconstruct IE6 registry keys with this script. I recommend using System Resore instead of this.

Related pages:

• Multiple-IE, an installer for the standalone versions of IE6, IE5.5, IE5, IE4, and IE3 !

Special thanks to Manfred Staudinger for the excellent article "Taming your Multiple IE standalones" which was the source reference for this article.